Articles

What’s behind the AFL’s sudden insistence that the game has Indigenous beginnings? | Paul Daley

We should allow for the possibility of a shared history but the timing of this changed position looks opportunistic

Debate over whether Australian football has its beginnings in Indigenous Marn Grook, a ball game with an ancient continental past, is intensifying after the AFL’s sudden insistence that the Aboriginal pastime has apparently influenced the earliest official Aussie Rules code.

Regardless of whether the Wentworth statue stands or falls, it's a conversation worth having | Paul Daley

Here’s the reality check: Wentworth was indeed a racist who saw the demise of Indigenous people as inevitable and desirous

Predictable outrage from the usual dreary quarters has greeted the call by supposedly “radical” University of Sydney students to tear down a statue of their institution’s founder, William Wentworth, because of his racist approach to Indigenous people.

Tony Birch on The White Girl: ‘No Aboriginal person I know is intact’

Birch’s new novel is an allegory of good, evil and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past – with strong black women at its core

Other writers may cringe to learn that Tony Birch wrote the first draft of his new novel, The White Girl, in about eight weeks.

Looking into the abyss: Don Watson on facing his mortality

One of Australia’s great writers talks to Paul Daley about death, faith, Australian character and surviving a leukaemia diagnosis

Don Watson decided to go for a few medical tests after attending the funeral of his old friend Michael Gordon, the loved and respected journalist who died far too young early last year.

Standing at my parents’ graves, I pondered how I'd feel if I couldn't visit them | Paul Daley

And I wondered why there has been no national outrage about the tens of thousands of stolen Indigenous remains

Occasionally you’ve just got to go with instinct, a force we may not understand but one in which we sometimes invest ahead of the tossed coin to resolve a hard decision or determine where to go at the forked path.

Australia’s leaders, its media and some historians persist in talking up the big Anzac game | Paul Daley

Anzac has become a national faith, a secular religion. And fact, of course, runs a distant second to belief when it comes to faith

Our four-year, half-a-billion-plus dollar festival of Anzac commemoration officially ended last November.

But it may still be too early to hope that our national remembrance might now extend beyond inflated myths about Australia’s first world war role in Europe and the Ottomans.

Both major parties were suckerpunched into supporting the $500m war memorial expansion | Paul Daley

The fear of being seen to disrespect Anzac has meant political support for the unnecessary expansion

Australia has not witnessed a more profligate cultural expense proceed with such a shamefully reckless absence of political scrutiny as the proposed half billion dollar expansion of the Australian War Memorial.

Eddie McGuire is too frequently bringing shame and embarrassment to Collingwood | Paul Daley

Casual, unintended discrimination has the very same impact as the intentional

Eddie McGuire could tell you that successful football clubs, like most enduring political parties, stand on history, myth and memory – handed down supporter to supporter, father to daughter, mother to son, decade after decade, even century after century.

Sydney moves to autumn without drumroll - surprising for this drama queen of a city | Paul Daley

I’m celebrating a change of season whose signs I’ve come to long for and celebrate

Born on the second day of autumn, it’s little wonder I’ve always felt most at home in cities where that season celebrates itself with dramatic shifts of hue and climate.

Melbourne. Canberra. London. And Canberra again, where the Limestone Plains – and the hundreds of thousands of European trees imposed upon them – segue from verdant to every glorious variation of russet and gold, as the air sharpens under an ever more vivid, clear cobalt sky.

'A big jump': People might have lived in Australia twice as long as we thought | Paul Daley

The result of 11 years of research suggests that human habitation could stretch to 120,000 years

Extensive archaeological research in southern Victoria has again raised the prospect that people have lived in Australia for 120,000 years – twice as long as the broadly accepted period of human continental habitation.

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